New York: An undercover vegan wired with a camera no bigger than a sugar cube spent six weeks last fall working at a Southern California slaughterhouse. To fit in, he brought sandwiches made with soy riblets and ate them in a dusty parking lot with the other workers.

The Humane Society of the United States first gave a 25-minute video made from his footage to the San Bernardino County district attorney, then in January released an edited version it on its Web site and to a newspaper. The video showed workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electricity and dragging them with chains to be processed into ground meat.

It was as if someone gave Upton Sinclair a video camera and a Web link. Animal cruelty charges were filed, the slaughterhouse was shut down and Congress held hearings.

The Agriculture Department announced the recall of more than 143 million pounds of meat — the largest in the nation’s history.

After more than 25 years of tactics that have included tossing a dead raccoon onto the lunch plate of Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor; boycotting fast-food restaurants; and staging legal challenges, the animal rights movement had a bona fide hit.

A new generation of cameras so small they can be hidden in eyeglasses frames or a hat — together with the rise of YouTube and the growing appeal of so-called citizen journalism — has done for animal rights advocates what the best-organised protest could not. Perhaps more than other social agitators, people concerned about animals raised for food have discovered that downloadable video can be the most potent weapon in their arsenal.

“Most activist organisations working on a national or international scale have already integrated all kinds of Internet content into their strategy,” said Eric Klinenberg, the author of Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007) and an associate professor of sociology at New York University.

Video downloads can be especially effective if they are picked up by the mainstream media and if they portray something plausible to an audience increasingly sophisticated at dissecting images on the Internet, he said.

The success of the Humane Society video was built on decades of trial and error by animal rights advocates who have spent years dragging bulky cameras around to slaughterhouses, sometimes posing as employees. The timing was right, too, coming when the level of public worry over food-borne pathogens and the oversight of the food supply is high.

Source : DNA